Circled back to the Holaplex marketplace as I saw in their Discord that sellers no longer need to spend AR to create or update a shop. I was able to create a shop HERE, mint, and put some NFT’s up for sale, but it cost me $7.00 for each one, which was a bit much in my opinion. I started out only asking for $1.54 for each because Solana fees are supposed to be almost non-existent then realized my mistake. Just going to leave them there for anyone that wants one. More from my experience after the pic. Hint: It wasn’t good.
Just a quick background, I’m exploring different NFT marketplaces to see which work the best for me to mint mostly small run NFT’s. I currently have a gallery and am minting on FTX.us HERE, but still have an eye out on other places. Have been messing around with generative NFT’s (the baby chick shown above) and figured I would test out Holaplex with them.
I like to browse through the NFT marketplace Discord servers to see if there are any major updates that really help out or address user concerns. I saw from the Holaplex October 8th update they said “No more arconnect!!” which I was hoping meant you no longer needed AR to create or modify a store. Checking their documentation, it still states you need a wallet with AR in it, but I was able to do everything without it. Everything now uses SOL, which is great!
I was able to happily mint away for about $2.20 of SOL, but when it came time to put the NFT up for a static sale, I didn’t realize it was costing me about $5.00 in SOL to create the sale. Their FAQ still says they only do auctions, which clearly isn’t the case. With that said, their docs still say they don’t take a fee on the sale either, but that might not be the case anymore. I guess they’re running a little behind on updating the docs.
After I minted and put some NFT’s up for sale on the shop for 0.01 SOL, or about $1.54 at current prices, I changed my wallet and tried to buy one. I confirmed two transactions totaling about 0.018 SOL (the system added 0.008 in fees) and then got stuck at this screen.
Even though the page was stuck there, the transaction completed and I received the NFT in my other wallet. Then, I had to pay to get paid.
Yep, you read that right. On the Solana blockchain, you have to “settle” certain transactions, and the sale of an NFT on Holaplex has to be settled. After a few minutes of waiting, a small number showed up next to my avatar in my shop. It informed me that I had to settle the funds for the transaction that just occured. I clicked the “settle” button and of course, that costs some SOL, and then I was also notified that I had royalty fees waiting for me. To get those, I need to pay another transaction fee in SOL.
These transaction fees aren’t big, we’re talking cents on the dollar, but they add up quick! Make sure you take that into account when listing your NFT’s on any marketplace using SOL or you could end up losing money.
At the end of this experiment, I was pretty frustrated. I was just going to end the listings and burn them all, but I had no such luck. In order to burn the ones I hadn’t listed for sale yet, I had to send them to the Solflare wallet and do it from there. That’s per the official Holaplex instructions.
I had minted Baby Chicks #01-#10 on Holaplex and I had listed #01-#07 for 0.01 SOL. I bought #01 on my own as a test, sent #8-#10 to Solflare and burned them, tried to claim #07 but it disappeared, and left #02-#06 up for sale if you want to buy them. I’m going to lose out on about $25 just from fees, but I chalk it up to the cost of learning so you won’t have to.
I really hope Holaplex updates their docs and continues to work on the site. It has a lot of potential, but right now, for a small time user like myself, it’s just makes for a frustrating experience.
Thanks for reading!
James
